Mind The Gap

Is Leaving The Left Leaving Blackness Behind?

It's not uncommon to come across this progressive maxim in black culture today; trying… to be white, is ostensibly what it means to think independently, outside the confines of what the Left defines as pro-black thought.

This is because allegedly, black people need such intellectual scaffolding to help us arrive at what's good for us collectively, especially as legitimized by progressive whites. For instance, if you dare to hold a public pro-life stance on abortion, don’t be surprised to learn from "black Twitter" that you hate all black women who are the largest victims of medically unnecessary abortions in America. If you don't vote for the party that black people have traditionally selected as sanctioned by white progressives, you are a traitor to your race and another helpless victim of white supremacy now made its slave again to do its cultural bidding.

I consider myself a student of history and culture and I’ve learned along the way, often by surprise, how diverse and broad black perspectives have been across the world on so many sociological and political issues. Black people have never been a monolith and are just as capable of determining their own destiny, what is for their individual and collective good, and deciding what political choices help them navigate there. We are after all social creatures and our political views by no means emerge from a social vacuum. As I rubbed shoulders with people who shared my increasingly secular and politically liberal views in my early thirties, I found my outlook on the world and what was wrong with it framed entirely by that set of political values. Even though at times there was some internal conflict against the grain of certain formative ideals, I felt I had to embrace this new mandate of disrupting the white heteronormative power stronghold in our world, to reverse the wrongs of history, to truly be black in the fullest sense.

The sense of belonging that comes from being accepted by your political tribe is deeply affirming and one is often petrified at the thought of becoming a castaway. This is especially the case when you believe your racial/cultural identity is wrapped up in your political ideology. I’ve never previously thought of myself as held captive by nor dependent on that sense of belonging, especially given my previous willingness to publicly disavow the faith of my youth in the face of backlash from my community.

But there is something that is much more costly about disembarkment from left-liberal politics for the black intellectual.

There is a kind of defiance that it represents that demands explanation. Because the entire popular worldview of the black elites, black thought leaders, academia, and the entertainment industry is baptized in the authority of leftist political rhetoric. By taking a journey of introspection, critical analysis of my presuppositions, and a deeper look into political theory, I have gained much-needed insight into what I found dissatisfying about the premise of so much of liberal Left ideology and why I could no longer blindly support so much of its societally saturated rhetoric.

I think the Left has leveraged the maximum capital out of victimhood in a way that undermines true impartial justice for all and prevents black people from walking in the fullness of their liberty by their own self-determination.

This is at least in part due to the way the Left has majorly polarized social conversations on the hot potato topics of our culture. Any disagreement with Leftist ideals makes you a sellout, bigot, oppressor, or blind victim of internalized white supremacy. We are victims by default and instructed to barter a degree of assistance from our oppressors based on leverage from our particular intersections of disadvantage. Everything is fractured and reconstructed through the distorted lens of who is more oppressed and we draw conclusions on who is right based on those premises.

We incessantly hear about power hierarchies from the Left; that white heterosexual men are undeservingly privileged with disproportionate access to socioeconomic power to harness wealth and success. Everyone else trickles downstream the narrowing tributary of oppression depending on their shade of melanin, gender presentation, sexuality, and more to be added as we discover new ways to exploit victimhood based on our differences and discrepancies of the socio-economic outcome.

Power is evil by default in the hands of conservatives, Christians, whites, and men. It is our salvation to recognize this and fight to reclaim that power and disseminate it among the oppressed classes. This has left so many victims of this ideology unable to understand how to use power in a constructive, strategic, and just way in society leading to further splintering and unending toxic division.

One of the most grievous things you can do to a victim of misfortune and unfair treatment is to make them believe they are powerless to overcome those setbacks primarily by their own self-determination; that their destiny was and is to be oppressed due to certain inherited factors. It makes them slaves to history itself.

While historic oppression is a reality, there has been a concerted Leftist effort to chain and disempower certain groups of people through the well-rehearsed victim narrative, finding reasons to depend on white progressive saviors in government to deliver them. This has created an abiding sense of helplessness, hypersensitivity to trauma porn, reactive/anticipatory grumbling, inertia towards change, and unwillingness to accept any in-group responsibility for moving forward. If this isn’t already tragic enough, the "oppressors'' become the “superior class” as they are pedestalized as the only source of salvation for their helpless victims to overcome. The quintessential example of a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one. This reinforces the imagined supremacy of one group and the actual inferiority complex of another.

I think there comes a time when you decide to think for yourself, realizing no camp has all the right political methodology or ideology despite what their spokespeople claim. I am on an ongoing journey of disabusing myself of a lot of the excuses I imbibed and regurgitated for what’s wrong in black society today and where the political solutions necessarily lie.

I'm grateful now that the scales were lifted, my faith in Christ restored, my ability to think critically and independently rejuvenated, and I can recognize & affirm the truth in spite of rabid ideological attempts to suppress it in popular culture.

Popular culture places a higher value on political expediency than uncompromising sincerity and has no room for black autonomous thought as it heads towards the inevitable train wreck of hard leftist political agendas.

I'll take my black behind off that train and leave with my blackness fully intact. Those who disembark must mind the gap.